The Daily Cut: Fleetwood Mac “Go Your Own Way”

Fleetwood Mac’s first U.S. Top 10 hit peaked at number-10 on the Billboard Hot 100

“Go Your Own Way” was a hit and eventually become a signature Fleetwood Mac song, but Lindsey Buckingham, who wrote it, says that surely wasn’t because the song has a simple beat you can dance to. “I don’t know how we came up with that rhythm. I was trying to get Mick to play some sort of a tom pattern and he played his own version of it and it became even less easy to figure out where the ‘one’ was on that. And then I did a sort of back-stroking guitar, so that you get this whole thing in the verse. Unless you know what it is beforehand, unless you’ve heard it a couple of times, or at least once, you have no idea where the beat is on the song until the chorus comes in. In a way, that was the hook.”